Design of engineering databases: A case for more varied semantic modelling concepts

摘要

Interest in database support for engineering applications is rapidly growing. In this paper we concentrate on conceptual database design and address the question of what a semantic model should look like, that meets the needs of engineering applications and is sufficiently formal to support validation, optimization, analysis, as well as transformation to an implementation schema. We present several case studies of engineering databases in order to determine major modelling requirements, and compare these to modelling concepts from the data base and knowledge representation fields. We demonstrate that the main issue is not adding further concepts, but to integrate the existing ones in a selective and precise fashion. We suggest to do so by tailoring the semantic model, starting from a set of base concepts and extending these. An initial model and an extensibility mechanism allowing an explicit and declarative definition of higher-order abstractions are presented. This is demonstrated by specifying some simple concepts such as generalization and a more complex time concept for image sequence evaluation.